IAIFI Colloquium - Friday 10/10/2025

[Thomas Bradford]

Hi all,

This Friday (October 10, 2025), the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (https://iaifi.org) will host its next public colloquium. Please find the details below. We hope you can join us!

Also, if you are interested in hearing more about IAIFI, you can sign up for our mailing list here: https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/iaifi-news 

Best,

Thomas

--

Details:

2:00pm ET Friday, October 10, 2025

IAIFI Public Colloquium (https://iaifi.org/events.html)

Scientific Machine Learning for Modeling and Understanding Complex Physical Systems

Peter Lu, Assistant Professor, Tufts University

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCueoFcGm_15kSB-wDd4CBZA

Abstract: Complex systems in nature—from climate to materials science—often exhibit strongly interacting, high-dimensional dynamics that are difficult to characterize, model, and understand. In the scientific community, there has been a growing interest in using modern machine learning (ML) tools to tackle these systems by identifying relevant physical features, accelerating expensive simulations, and solving difficult inverse problems. However, despite significant advances over the past decade, we are still learning how to effectively use ML in science and engineering. My work focuses on developing foundational ML methods for modeling and understanding complex physical systems from high-dimensional chaotic dynamics to many-body quantum systems. In this talk, I will introduce novel contrastive learning-based approaches for training physically consistent ML emulators and performing high-dimensional simulation-based inference. I will also discuss new ML methods for efficiently simulating interacting quantum systems. These advances demonstrate how we can use ML to solve scientific problems by combining tools from representation learning and generative modeling with theoretical insights from statistics, dynamical systems theory, and mathematical physics.

-- 

Thomas Bradford

Project Coordinator, IAIFI